Presentation outlines should be visual

Everyone knows that it is important to think about the story and flow of your presentation before opening PowerPoint and start designing slides. Paper sketches are great, sticky notes are great. But there is one common approach that usually does not work: writing the story out long-hand in Word.

Long-hand text looks final. When you want to discuss it with a team of people, they start paying attention to wording, fine tuning messages. This is wasted energy at this stage in the process.

But more importantly, text is not visual. "Here we need an image of a man standing in the street holding his phone up in the air in despair". It is much more powerful to discuss the draft or first ideas of a visual presentation with - well - visuals!

As a result I often end up scribbling the first version of a presentation in PowerPoint. But in this case PowerPoint is not the slide design tool, rather a simple note pad to organize ideas.

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